- Tuchman, Barbara W.
The Guns of August.
New York: Presidio Press, [1962, 1988, 1994] 2004.
ISBN 978-0-345-47609-8.
-
One hundred years ago the world was on the brink of a cataclysmic
confrontation which would cause casualties numbered in the tens of
millions, destroy the pre-existing international order, depose
royalty and dissolve empires, and plant the seeds for tyrannical
regimes and future conflicts with an even more horrific toll in
human suffering. It is not exaggeration to speak of World War I
as the pivotal event of the 20th century, since so much that
followed can be viewed as sequelæ which can be traced directly
to that conflict.
It is thus important to understand how that war came to be, and how
in the first month after its outbreak the expectations of all parties
to the conflict, arrived at through the most exhaustive study by
military and political élites, were proven completely wrong
and what was expected to be a short, conclusive war turned instead into
a protracted blood-letting which would continue for more than four
years of largely static warfare. This magnificent book, which covers
the events leading to the war and the first month after its outbreak,
provides a highly readable narrative history of the period with
insight into both the grand folly of war plans drawn up in isolation
and mechanically followed even after abundant evidence of their
faults have caused tragedy, but also how contingency—chance,
and the decisions of fallible human beings in positions of authority
can tilt the balance of history.
The author is not an academic historian, and she writes for a
popular audience. This has caused some to sniff at her work, but as
she noted, Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, and MacCauley did not have Ph.D.s.
She immerses the reader in the world before the war, beginning with the
1910 funeral in London of Edward VII where nine monarchs rode in the
cortège, most of whose nations would be at war four years hence. The
system of alliances is described in detail, as is the mobilisation plans
of the future combatants, all of which would contribute to fatal
instability of the system to a small perturbation.
Germany, France, Russia, and Austria-Hungary had all drawn up detailed
mobilisation plans for assembling, deploying, and operating their
conscript armies in the event of war. (Britain, with an all-volunteer
regular army which was tiny by continental standards, had no
pre-defined mobilisation plan.) As you might expect, Germany's plan
was the most detailed, specifying railroad schedules and the
composition of individual trains. Now, the important thing to keep
in mind about these plans is that, together, they created a powerful
first-mover advantage. If Russia began to mobilise, and Germany
hesitated in its own mobilisation in the hope of defusing the conflict,
it might be at a great disadvantage if Russia had only a few days of
advance in assembling its forces. This means that there was a powerful
incentive in issuing the mobilisation order first, and a compelling reason
for an adversary to begin his own mobilisation order once news of it
became known.
Compounding this instability were alliances which compelled parties to
them to come to the assistance of others. France had no direct interest
in the conflict between Germany and Austria-Hungary and Russia in
the Balkans, but it had an alliance with Russia, and was pulled into
the conflict. When France began to mobilise, Germany activated its own
mobilisation and the
Schlieffen plan
to invade France through Belgium. Once the Germans violated the neutrality
of Belgium, Britain's guarantee of that neutrality required (after the
customary ambiguity and dithering) a declaration of war against Germany,
and the stage was set for a general war in Europe.
The focus here is on the initial phase of the war: where Germany, France,
and Russia were all following their pre-war plans, all initially
expecting a swift conquest of their opponents—the
Battle of the Frontiers,
which occupied most of the month of August 1914. An afterword covers the
First Battle of the Marne
where the German offensive on the Western front was halted and the stage set
for the static trench warfare which was to ensue. At the conclusion of that
battle, all of the shining pre-war plans were in tatters, many commanders
were disgraced or cashiered, and lessons learned through the tragedy
“by which God teaches the law to kings” (p. 275).
A century later, the lessons of the outbreak of World War I could not be more
relevant. On the eve of the war, many believed that the interconnection of
the soon-to-be belligerents through trade was such that war was unthinkable,
as it would quickly impoverish them. Today, the world is even more connected
and yet there are conflicts all around the margins, with alliances spanning the
globe. Unlike 1914, when the world was largely dominated by great powers, now
there are rogue states, non-state actors, movements dominated by religion,
and neo-barbarism and piracy loose upon the stage, and some of these may lay
their hands on weapons whose destructive power dwarf those of 1914–1918.
This book, published more than fifty years ago, about a conflict a century
old, could not be more timely.
- Patterson, William H., Jr.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century. Vol. 1
New York: Tor Books, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-7653-1960-9.
-
Robert Heinlein came from a family who had been present in America before there
were the United States, and whose members had served in all of the wars of the
Republic. Despite being thin, frail, and with dodgy eyesight, he managed to be
appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy where, despite demerits for being a hellion,
he graduated and was commissioned as a naval officer. He was on the track to a
naval career when felled by tuberculosis (which was, in the 1930s, a potential death
sentence, with the possibility of recurrence any time in later life).
Heinlein had written while in the Navy, but after his forced medical retirement,
turned his attention to writing science fiction for pulp magazines, and
after receiving a cheque for US$ 70 for his first short story,
“Life-Line”,
he exclaimed, “How long has this racket been
going on? And why didn't anybody tell me about it sooner?” Heinlein
always viewed writing as a business, and kept a thermometer on which he
charted his revenue toward paying off the mortgage on his house.
While Heinlein fit in very well with the Navy, and might have been, absent
medical problems, a significant commander in the fleet in World War II,
he was also, at heart, a bohemian, with a soul almost orthogonal to military
tradition and discipline. His first marriage was a fling with a woman who
introduced him to physical delights of which he was unaware. That ended
quickly, and then he married Leslyn, who was his muse, copy-editor, and
business manager in a marriage which persisted throughout World War II,
when both were involved in war work. Leslyn worked herself in this effort
into insanity and alcoholism, and they divorced in 1947.
It was Robert Heinlein who vaulted science fiction from the ghetto of the
pulp magazines to the “slicks” such as Collier's and the
Saturday Evening Post. This was due to a technological transition
in the publishing industry which is comparable to that presently underway in
the migration from print to electronic publishing. Rationing of paper during
World War II helped to create the “pocket book” or paperback
publishing industry. After the end of the war, these new entrants in the
publishing market saw a major opportunity in publishing anthologies of stories
previously published in the pulps. The pulp publishers viewed this as an
existential threat—who would buy a pulp magazine if, for almost the same
price, one could buy a collection of the best stories from the last
decade in all of those magazines?
Heinlein found his fiction entrapped in this struggle. While today, when you sell
a story to a magazine in the U.S., you usually only sell “First North American
serial rights”, in the 1930s and 1940s, authors sold all rights, and it was
up to the publisher to release their rights for republication of a work in an
anthology or adaptation into a screenplay. This is parallel to the contemporary battle
between traditional publishers and independent publishing platforms, which have
become the heart of science fiction.
Heinlein was complex. While an exemplary naval officer, he was a nudist, married
three times, interested in the esoteric (and a close associate of
Jack Parsons
and
L. Ron Hubbard).
He was an enthusiastic supporter of
Upton Sinclair's
EPIC movement and
his “Social Credit” agenda.
This authorised biography, with major contributions from Heinlein's widow, Virginia,
chronicles the master storyteller's life in his first forty years—until he found,
or created, an audience receptive to the tales of wonder he spun. If you've read
all of Heinlein's fiction, it may be difficult to imagine how much of it was based in
Heinlein's own life. If you thought Heinlein's later novels were weird, appreciate
how the master was weird before you were born.
I had the privilege of meeting Robert and Virginia Heinlein in 1984. I shall always
cherish that moment.
- Long, Rob.
Conversations with My Agent (and Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke).
London: Bloomsbury Publishing, [1996, 2005] 2014.
ISBN 978-1-4088-5583-6.
-
Hollywood is a strange place, where the normal rules of business, economics,
and personal and professional relationships seem to have been suspended.
When he arrived in Hollywood in 1930,
P. G. Wodehouse
found the customs and antics of its denizens so bizarre that he parodied
them in a series of hilarious stories. After a year in Hollywood, he'd
had enough and never returned. When Rob Long arrived in Hollywood to attend
UCLA film school, the television industry was on the threshold of a
technology-driven change which would remake it and forever put an end to the
domination by three large networks which had existed since its inception.
The advent of cable and, later, direct to home satellite broadcasting
eliminated the terrestrial bandwidth constraints which had made establishing
a television outlet forbiddingly expensive and, at the same time, side-stepped
many of the regulatory constraints which forbade “edgy” content
on broadcast channels. Long began his television career as a screenwriter
for
Cheers
in 1990, and became an executive producer of the show in 1992. After
the end of Cheers, he created and produced other television
projects, including
Sullivan & Son,
which is currently on the air.
Television ratings measure both “rating points”: the absolute number of
television sets tuned into the program, and “share points”: the
fraction of television sets turned on at the time viewing the program.
In the era of Cheers, a typical episode might have a rating
equivalent to more than 22 million viewers and a share of 32%, meaning
it pulled in around one third of all television viewers in its time slot.
The proliferation of channels makes it unlikely any show will achieve numbers
like this again. The extremely popular
24
attracted between 9 and 14 million viewers in its eight seasons, and
the highly critically regarded
Mad Men
never topped a mean viewership of 2.7 million in its best season.
It was into this new world of diminishing viewership expectations but
voracious thirst for content to fill all the new channels that the
author launched his post-Cheers career. The present
volume collects two books originally published independently,
Conversations with My Agent from 1998, and
2005's Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke, written as
Hollywood's
перестро́йка
was well-advanced. The volumes fit
together almost seamlessly, and many readers will barely notice the
transition.
This is a very funny book, but there is also a great deal of wisdom
about the ways of Hollywood, how television projects are created,
pitched to a studio, marketed to a network, and the tortuous process
leading from concept to script to pilot to series and, all too often,
to cancellation. The book is written as a screenplay,
complete with scene descriptions, directions, dialogue, transitions,
and sound effect call-outs. Most of the scenes are indeed
conversations between the author and his agent in various
circumstances, but we also get to be a fly on the wall at story
pitches, meetings with the network, casting, shooting an episode,
focus group testing, and many other milestones in the life cycle of a
situation comedy. The circumstances are fictional, but are clearly
informed by real-life experience. Anybody contemplating a career in
Hollywood, especially as a television screenwriter, would be insane
not to read this book. You'll laugh a lot, but also learn something
on almost every page.
The reader will also begin to appreciate the curious ways of Hollywood
business, what the author calls “HIPE”: the Hollywood
Inversion Principle of Economics. “The HIPE, as it will come
to be known, postulates that every commonly understood, standard
business practice of the outside world has its counterpart in the
entertainment industry. Only it's backwards.” And anybody who
thinks accounting is not a creative profession has never had experience
with a Hollywood project. The culture of the entertainment business is
also on display—an intricate pecking order involving writers,
producers, actors, agents, studio and network executives, and “below
the line” specialists such as camera operators and editors, all of whom
have to read the trade papers to know who's up and who's not.
This book provides an insider's perspective on the strange way television
programs come to be. In a way, it resembles some aspects of venture
capital: most projects come to nothing, and most of those which are
funded fail, losing the entire investment. But the few which succeed
can generate sufficient money to cover all the losses and still yield
a large return. One television show that runs for five years, producing
solid ratings and 100+ episodes to go into syndication, can set up its
writers and producers for life and cover the studio's losses on all of
the dogs and cats.